Friday, June 17, 2016

A group of us went to this movie because of The Rock, more properly known now as Dwayne Johnson. We expected to be uncomfortable for most of the film, because we were sure we would be the victims of an onslaught of painfully awkward humor, but, hey, The Rock.

I'm very happy to have been wrong about this one. Although the opening few minutes of flashback--the key moments of which are in the trailer--were indeed as uncomfortable as we expected, once the movie jumped to the present, it hit its stride and delivered a consistently funny and entertaining ride.

Dwayne Johnson plays the awkward and very fat geek grown into a powerful CIA agent--who is still a geek--perfectly. Kevin Hart delivered the best and most subdued performance I've seen from him, in part because much of the time he was the straight man.

The supporting cast members were uniformly fine, with Danielle Nicolet a standout as Hart's wife.

2 comments:

old aggie
said...

I saw it yesterday and literally laughed till I cried. I love slapstick and silly humor, and "Central Intelligence" delivered in spades.

I also liked the anti-bullying message, and I was especially intrigued with that one scene where, confronted by his former tormentor, the one character just froze up and couldn't do anything including defend himself - that just rang true to me, though I was never targeted that badly by bullies in my youth.

One thing that seemed a little odd was the number of little children - like as young as 5-6 - who were there with their parents. I know it's PG-13, but to me it's not so much of a "family" film as, say, a Star Wars film that's PG-13. There's nothing that bad in it, I guess, but seems like a ton of stuff that kids wouldn't understand at all. Interesting.